South Africa’s future leader is a man of many parts. But his message to the country’s whites is plain

LAYING down his pipe to spoon sugar into a china tea cup from a four-legged silver bowl, the former communist revolutionary considered the question. Was he, Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, satisfied with the pace of change in post-apartheid South Africa? “The reality is that the legacy of apartheid still defines present-day South Africa,” he began. The “transformation” of the country, the darkening of the complexion of its institutions of power—its conglomerates, its universities, its newspapers—was always going to take time. But, he continued:

the white population I don't think has quite understood the importance of this challenge If you were speaking of national reconciliation based on the maintenance of the status quo, because you did not want to move at a pace that frightens the whites, it means you wouldn't carry out the task of transformation. You would not produce reconciliation on that basis. It might look so to the people who benefited from apartheid—everybody's forgiven us, nobody's after nationalising our swimming pools. It isn't, because you have the anger that would be boiling among the black people. So, you've got to transform the society.

In short, Mr Mbeki, who is set to take over as head of the African National Congress in December when President Nelson Mandela retires, and is likely to succeed him in 1999 as state president, is ready to give whites a harder time. Not through such rash measures as land nationalisation or extra taxation, but by using state patronage to do more to get blacks into positions of influence. “Affirmative action isn't a philosophy, it's not an end in itself,” he explains: “It's an instrument to get to a more equal society, broadly representative of South African demography.”

The soothing of white apprehension has been the hallmark of Mr Mandela's government, the price of achieving a peaceful transition from apartheid. But Mr Mbeki, who treads the same delicate line between black hopes and white fears, navigates a different path. He weighs the acknowledged risk of scaring off whites against a greater need to thwart a black rebellion if, five years hence, nothing much has changed.

His “Africanisation” is not of the crude Zimbabwean sort. He wants to reassure the whites of their home on South African soil. But he expects, in return, certain obligations, and will not accept white complacency: the argument that they have done enough already. A favourite example is the recent awarding of a contract to publish the state-owned South African Airways in-flight magazine to a young black company, after many years with an established white one. The white company grumbled about unfair tokenism. Mr Mbeki's view is: give the new guys a chance.

South Africans are puzzled by Mr Mbeki, who embodies both radicalism and moderation. He is a former communist, inheriting his party allegiance from his father, Govan, once a prisoner with Mr Mandela. But in the 1980s, he became the darling of white business, which found his cosmopolitan air and eloquence reassuringly familiar.

The ambiguity continues. He is firm that the government's fiscally conservative economic policy, which he oversaw, is worth sticking to even if one day it costs him political friends in the unions: “I don't think you can buy political allegiance and political cohesion by doing the wrong things,” he says. At the same time he defends as reasonable the nomination of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Mr Mandela's former wife, who is also a convicted child kidnapper, for ANC deputy president, a position to be filled at the party's conference in December. If this sends shivers through the markets, it is because outsiders do not understand South Africa's past: “It doesn't scare us,” says Mr Mbeki.

This is a man who, unlike Mr Mandela, cannot draw his authority either in the ANC or in the country from warm affection or moral stature. He must stamp it on the party, and this effort requires stitching together the motley collection of groups that make up this sprawling organisation. Deal-making is the centrepiece of the way he runs government, which, under Mr Mandela's increasingly monarchical eye, he already does.

Take privatisation. To his supporters this used to be a dirty word, which smacked of Thatcherism and all that the ANC once detested. The trade unions squealed so loudly at its mere mention that last year the government backed away from it, and began to talk coyly about “restructuring of state assets” instead. Yet privatisation has been taking place: several radio stations and a domestic airline have already been sold, and the telephone company has been partially privatised. Airports, the national airline, a diamond mine, a parcel delivery service and a forestry company are all due to go under the hammer.

How? Thanks to Mr Mbeki's deft backroom manoeuvring, the unions are being persuaded of the merits of private ownership. These days, they are even setting up their own investment companies so that they can buy shares in the companies whose sale they once so firmly opposed.

At their best, such deals persuade supposedly irreconcilable parties of their common interest. At worst, they could pile up Mr Mbeki's political debts for the future. He insists, however, that whatever the pressures to go soft on economic management, some aspects, such as the pledge to cut the budget deficit (currently 4% of GDP), are “set in stone”. No less firm is his message to South Africa's whites, who still hold most of the country's economic power: if they do not change things voluntarily, he will not hesitate to force them to do so.